The 2007 Edinburgh International Film Festival (Aug 15-26) will have a special focus on Cinema and the Written Word.

The first Festival under new artistic director Hannah McGill will celebrate the art of screenwriting with a series of events that run across the major Edinburgh arts festivals.

There will be on-stage talks with screenwriters William Nicholson, Paul Laverty, Irvine Welsh and Christopher Hampton.

The Festival's retrospective is devoted to Gentlemen Prefer Blondes author Anita Loos and will concentrate on her many years as a Hollywood screenwriter, ranging from work on D. W. Griffith's Intolerance (1916) to MGM classics like San Francisco (1936) and The Women (1939).

The Festival had previously announced David Mackenzie's Berlin prize-winner Hallam Foe as its opening night gala and has now confirmed Julie Delpy's romantic comedy Two Days In Paris as the closing attraction.

Delpy will attend Edinburgh and participate in a strong line-up of public interviews that also includes Chris Cooper, Bob Hoskins, Mike Leigh, Stephen Frears, John Waters, Judd Apatow, Samantha Morton, Stellan Skarsgard and Tilda Swinton who assumed the role of the Festival's patron earlier this year.

The full Festival line-up includes Sundance sensation Teeth, Berlin hit The Counterfeiters and such Cannes highlights as Control, Paranoid Park , Death Proof and The Man From London . Stellar gala selections include Knocked Up, Ratatouille, Matthew Vaughn's Stardust and Ethan Hawke's The Hottest State .

British features contending for the Michael Powell Award include Anand Tucker's And When Did You Last See Your Father' and Jim Threapleton's Extraordinary Rendition.

Archive selections within the Festival include the three remastered Laurence Olivier Shakespeare adaptations and a full remastered print of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz.

The Festival will also host a presentation of a new solo work from cinematographer Christopher Doyle and serve as the UK launchpad for Martin Scorsese's World Cinema Foundation.

The festival's new Trailblazers programme, with Skillset, has selected the new British talents it will honour at this year's festival. They are:

actor Matthew Beard from And When Did You Last See Your Father'
actors Sam Riley and Toby Kebbell from Control
writer/director Jim Threapleton for Extraordinary Rendition
actor Omar Berdouni for Extraordinary Rendition
producer Elise Valmorbida for Saxon
writer Dominic Leyton for Sugarhouse
director Tom Shankland for WAZ
director Paul Taylor for We Are Together

Also, Trailblazers from the Skillset Screen Academy Network are Marcel Fores, Chu-Li Shewring, Dan Pearce, Eduardo Grau, Dan Gray, Tom Brown, Ed Casey, David Stoddart, Melissa Choong, James Hing, Hermann Karlsson, Timo Langer, Roger Glassford, Christian Neuman, Sergio Alejandro Leon Enicas, Paz Febrega, Anu Menon, Harold Beeker and Esther Niemeier.

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